Chrome will soon let you perform a ‘Privacy review’ similar to its ‘Safety check’

First spotted by Dinsan over at Chrome Story, Chrome Canary will soon have a new developer flag for enabling what’s called ‘Privacy Review’. Once toggled, it shows a new subpage in the Chrome settings area that lets you step through each privacy setting provided so that you can stay up to snuff on what’s available and how you have it set up. Currently, this area does not show the ‘Privacy and security review’ option at the top of the image below.

Privacy Review: Add a new PrivacyReview feature flag
“Shows a new subpage in Settings, helping the user to review various privacy settings.”

Chromium Repository

According to Dinsan, who was able to enable the developer flag already (I have the update, but have yet to apply it for productivity reasons) the new option is not yet functional, but it shouldn’t be long before that changes. It’s important to note that most users won’t see this tool for a few weeks until it comes to Chrome stable.

Chrome already has what’s called a ‘Safety check’ which can be found under ‘Settings’ and then ‘Safety check’ marked with the shield icon. Clicking the blue ‘Check now’ button allows the browser to cycle through your passwords, extensions, and more to check for breaches, bad actors, and so on. If it finds anything, it gives you step-by-step instructions on removing extensions or changing your passwords to avert disaster. The new privacy check option should do something similar, but we’ll have to wait and see exactly what it will offer.

Any and all tools introduced by Google that put users in control of their privacy and data are good, in my opinion. Just last week, the company was smeared for intentionally hiding privacy controls in Google Maps in a way that made it difficult for people to find and use them, but overall, it’s been keen to draw tools like this out in the open since its congressional hearing on Capitol Hill a few years ago.